Making a Murderer creators drop bombshell about juror in Steven Avery case

It’s hard to walk away from Netflix’s Making a Murderer without a big sense of outrage. Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey are now serving life sentences in a Wisconsin prison.

RICCIARDI: We do, we were contacted by one of the jurors who sat through Steven Avery’s trial and shared with us their thoughts.

“(The juror) told us that they believe Steven Avery was not proven guilty”, said Laura Ricciardi, who filmed the series with Moira Demos. “They told us really that they were afraid that if they held out for a mistrial that it would be easy to identify which juror had done that and that they were fearful for their own safety, ” Demos added.

Though it aims at getting the attention of President Obama, because Avery is a state inmate and not a federal one, a presidential pardon is not possible according to the Department of Justice.

More than 300,000 people have signed petitions on Change.org and WhiteHouse.gov calling for Avery to be exonerated.

A separate petition, started on the change.org website by a Colorado resident, Michael Seyedian, a Colorado resident, had garnered 194,428 signatures late on Monday.

But while he was suing Manitowoc County in Wisconsin over that wrongful imprisonment, he was arrested over the death in 2005 of a 25-year-old photographer named Teresa Halbach.

It also alleges that Manitowoc County police used “improper methods” to ensure the conviction of both men, and calls the entire episode a “black mark on the justice system as a whole”. DNA evidence later proved he was innocent of the crimes, and in 2003 his conviction was overturned. It asks President Barack Obama to pardon Avery and Dassey, who’s also serving a life sentence. Avery and Dassey were convicted in 2007 of killing Halbach at the family’s rural Two Rivers property on Halloween of 2005.

Prosecuting attorney Ken Kratz has been making the media rounds, too, to defend the verdict and his handling of the case, as portrayed in the documentary.